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Citation needed.
More like second means a second division of hour.
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Should’ve started at 0. Why is 12 < 1?
The 12 hour division of the day is about a thousand years older than the idea to write zero as its own number, which I think could be the reason
this, but also, while the number 0 to denote absence of something has been the norm for some time, counting from zero wasn’t much of a thing before the digital era
edit: more to support my theory, before the 1950s (the advent of computing) zero wasn’t really used as an ordinal at all
Measuring tools started from 0 way before the digital era. A clock is a measuring tool. The reason is, people were too used to saying “12 o’clock” and seeing a 0 would throw them off
Measuring tools started from 0 way before the digital era
that’s true, but when you’re measuring something the value you get is a cardinal, not an ordinal. I agree that we have been using 0 as a cardinal for a long time. however, we’ve been using 0 as an ordinal only since 1950s
people think of time as a sequence of events, hence there’s 1st (1 o’clock), 2nd (2 o’clock) and so on until the 12th (12 o’clock)
It does, in most places outside of the US.
24-hour timekeeping (aka military time) solves a lot of weirdness about clocks, but not all of it.
Ehhhh that doesn’t really answer the question though, as non-digital 24 hour clocks still often have the numbers 1-24 rather than 0-23. Or sometimes even 1-12 twice
You mean analog 24-hour clocks? Those things are cursed. You still say “zero twenty-five” even if there’s no 0 on the face.
And clocks that only go to 12 and repeat are just regular clocks.
😂
No, you’re a towel
JJ?
Jeans o’clock
My friend, that picture you linked to is anything but a regular clock.
It is a clock, but it looks like whomever designed it wanted to also make it a sundial yet without having the foresight to convert it into a 24-hour display. Double cursed.
It’s an example of the “1-12 twice” that I was referencing
Inventor: Cause 12 is nil, zilch 🤪
Base 12 you filthy casual
at least it isn’t base decimal
Every base is base 10 if you write it in its own base
yes that is why I specified decimal, I am a jan misali enjoyer
Love Jan misali, but I disagree with him that base 6 is preferable. Base 12 is best base.
This guy bases.
I’m from c/all and WTF does this mean? I understand base 10, 2, and 12 and the concept of a base in general but…wut???
Oh boy, I am not sure I have the vocabulary to explain this effectively. But I will try!
Okay so normally when we say “base 10” or “base 2”, the number in that description is itself in base 10, right? Like the “10” in “base 10” means the number of fingers most humans have (including thumbs), and the “2” in “base 2” means the number of things in a pair.
You will note, though, that for that “10” to mean what it means, and that “2” to mean what it means, they must be in base 10 themselves. A pair of things in base 2 is 10 things, right? So then if you write the “2” in “base 2” in base 2, it’s “base 10”. And this holds true for any base. How do you write a dozen in base 12? 10. So base 12, written in base 12, is base 10.
Nailed it. This was a perfect explanation. Thank you!
There is an old unix calculator program called bc where one can change the input and output base.
If you change the input base and then the output base strange things happen as bc interprets the output base number in the input base .
ibase=2 obase=10 The output base is now 2 (in base 10)
The number 2 in base 2 is 1x2 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 3 ib base 3 is 1x3 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 7 in base 7 is 1x7 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 268 in base 268 is 1x268 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
c/eli5
i got you, so basically, in a “base” system, each given “number position” or place value, as we call it holds the value equivalent to it’s base, so in base ten, the first position, holds 0-9, the second one holds 0-9 as well, but it’s tacked on the beginning of the last place value, so it’s an additive system.
In binary for example, 00 would be 0 in base 10. 01, would be 1 in b10, 10 would be 2 in b10, and 11 would be 3 in b10. This is because in binary, the first position is a value of 1, the second is 2, the third is 4, the fourth is 8, etc. It doubles everytime you add one more place value. So in binary you’re representing any given number, from the most mathematically optimal way to create that number, given a set of values. The 0 or 1 in that place just denotes whether or not that value is “present”
The same thing happens in base 10, or base 12, or base 8. With base 10 it’s just a lot more intuitive to us.
The joke here is that in base 268, that 10 in base 10, is actually a representation of the highest possible value, in any given base system. So technically in base 268, you would use 0-267 (im using base 10 here as a reference, this wouldn’t be done in base ten obviously, this is why i really like binary as an example, because it’s mathematically simple, and very intuitive to comprehend), and when you reach 268, you would roll over, and add an additional place value. Making it 10.
This is true for every base system, due to how base 10 is represented in those systems, it’s a confusing joke because the human brain is wired to think about it base 10, when it isn’t.
Oh I’m sorry, I’m an engineer and learned about bases in college. I was just saying how the above comment was pretty much exactly what I’d expect to see in a c/eli5 post! Super succinct
Based
Too much maths 🥴
This is [email protected].
Actually, they used base 60.
The day starts at zero, not 12. 12 is “Noon” ie halfway through the day. The clock starts at 12 because it’s more practical than inscribing 24 divisions in a circle. And the 6 doesn’t “mean 30”, it’s simply the hour marking at the bottom of the circle. Finally, the 12 hour clock was invented after the 24 hour day, not the other way around.
And inb4 “I bet you’re fun at parties”. I’m all for “this logic is ridiculous” jabs, but this is just misrepresenting everything to make it sound stupid. Everything sounds stupid when you purposefully get it wrong.
The clock starts at 12 and not 0 because humanity didn’t have the concept of 0 when we invented the 12 hour clock
I mean the day does start at “the 12” on the face of the clock. And 30 minutes is at the 6 on the clock. I get what you’re saying but come on they both make sense.
You must be fun at parties 😉 jk I’d party with you! I’m not very fun at parties tho.
Well to add some more pedantry to this conversation, only one of the explanations makes sense, the other is obtuse for comic effect.
Let’s all have an awful party together 🥳
In the US the day starts at 12 AM; there is no zero.
Let me introduce you to something known as military time (which, yes, even exists in the US)…
The most unlogical thing. If it starts at 12 AM, the next hour is 1 PM, right?
I prefer midnight and noon, or a 24h clock.You don’t know what a.m. and p.m. mean.
The most unlogical thing. If it starts at 12 AM, the next hour is 1 PM, right?
No, ante meridiem and post meridiem say whether it’s before or after noon, thus, after 12:59 AM comes 1:00 AM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight
I mean when looking at numbers:
. . . . . . 1100pm 1159pm 1200am 1259am 0100am … 1100am 1159am 1200pm 1259pm 0100pm … 230024h 235924h 000024h 005924h 010024h … 110024h 115924h 120024h 125924h 130024h … Too much confusion.
Even NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US) suggests:
To avoid ambiguity, specification of an event as occurring on a particular day at 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m. is a good idea, especially legal documents such as contracts and insurance policies. Another option would be to use 24-hour clock, using the designation of 0000 to refer to midnight at the beginning of a given day (or date) and 2400 to designate the end of a given day (or date).
I didn’t want to imply that the use of the 12 hour system should be prefered in any way. Just that the division into AM and PM follows some logic. Its just the numbering 12, 1, 2,… that’s weird.
I like your reply. I think it’s a source of all problems.
“midnight” and “noon” for sure.
… And now I’m thinking about all those super heros and villains named “midnight” and their logical counter-characters “noon”
the 12 is a zero point, it’s just listed as 12.
Personally, I enjoy this kind of discussion at parties.
You sound fun at parties
You sound stupid when I purposefully get it wrong
Edit: dear Lord, y’all’s funny bones are broken tonight
Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.
To akshually your akshually, the day DOES start at 12 in places that use a 12 hour clock, since midnight is 12am and there is no 0am.
Also this meme is not a serious criticism of clocks meant to be taken literally, so taking it as such so you can debunk it just makes it look like you’re trying too hard to appear smart.
to akshually your actually post, the 12 IS zero. noon, as in midday isn’t zero, which is a sort of arbitrary decision. That’s the differentiating feature between the two systems.
Technically i guess you could count the noon point as 0 also, but that provides ambiguity, so i think it;s better to treat noon as 12, and midnight as 00:00 (but listed as noon) because then it perfectly maps to 24hr time.
12 is the zero point, it’s just indexed one off, because there isn’t a 00:00 timeslot in 12 hr time, so it needs to be 12.
It has to do with 24hr time being zero indexed, and 12hr time being 1 indexed, so it’s slightly offset at the point of day changeover.
The clock is two dials at the same time superimposed on another. There’s one 12 hour dial and one 60 minute dial. To save space and material they are combined into one.
Still doesn’t explain why the clock goes from 1 to 12, and not 0 to 11.
It does. 0-11 and 1-12 contain the same (12) amount of hours. Saying “twelve thirty two” just rolls off the tongue easier than “zero thirty two” or “o thirty two”.
Not to mention zero is a much later invention than the sexagesimal system.
Also here’s a clock with zero on it.
Also 12 can be divided by many factors (1;2;3;4;6;12) where as 11 is a prime number.
here’s a clock with zero on it
I like this clock very much and want one in my home.
Yes except why is no single digit except for 0 zero-padded?
Okay, now this clock is [email protected]
It kind of checks out that the people that made the first fully functional writing system were also the kind of massive nerds (complimentary) to do their maths in base 60
Try 24-hour time for a month. It’s slightly weird at first solely because 1) everyone else uses 12-hour and 2) you’ve used 12-hour your whole life, but after that it’s great and frankly better than what you use now. Translations between 12-hour time become 100% automatic, so you can use it in your personal life without feeling like you’re switching (you might even get one or two friends to join you). The following are advantages just for you, not accounting for the larger advantages that come when everyone is using it:
- You can drop the AM and PM on digital clocks with no loss of information. It’s a small thing, but this gives me room for a seconds position on the clock on my taskbar. (Side note: given 8 billion people on Earth and given how often time shows up, I feel like these trillions of miniscule savings getting rid of AM and PM might add up to something actually meaningful.)
- You’ll never have that experience where you oversleep during a nap so badly that you get confused if it’s AM or PM.
- Most intervals we usually talk about for things (e.g. “I have school from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM” or “I have work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.”) do not include midnight in their range (e.g. “I slept from 9:00 PM until 6:30 AM”). Thus, arithmetic is easier because you don’t have to account for the modulus (at worst in the latter example, it’s the same). For example, when I go to school from 06:00 to 14:00, that’s just 8 hours. When I work a 09:00 to 17:00, that’s 8 hours. It’s just the actual arithmetic. It’s currently 10:00 and the assignment is due at midnight? Then I have 14 hours left to get it done. Whereas for 12-hour time, I need to account for the modulus: “okay, there’s x hours on this side of the 12 hours and y hours on this other side; add those” is how I probably do it in my head. Subtracting times is especially nice. For example, if something has been happening since 00:30 and it’s now 13:45, then I just need to subtract 30 minutes from 45 and I immediately have my answer. 1:45 minus 12:45, meanwhile? Nah. This also makes timezones much easier to do mentally. If I have +14 for my time and it’s 06:00, then I know it’s 20:00 there. Trivial. You do lose that sweet spot where something is exactly 12 hours apart, but that’s miniscule compared to how easy everything else is.
- Starting at 00:00 for midnight instead of 12:00 is just so much nicer. 12-hour time has no 0, which to me is just kind of stupid. Namely for aesthetic, intuition, and arithmetic reasons.
- If speaking to someone internationally, intuitively knowing both formats means you don’t even need to think about a conversion (let alone do one at all once you really get it down). Lots of countries use 24-hour time orally and written, and even more use it just in writing.
- Date and time formats use 24-hour rather than 12-hour time, so you can read these automatically instead of needing to convert.
- This one’s very unobjective, but I feel like I’ve been less inclined to go to bed late when dealing with larger numbers. “Oh, it’s just nine” versus now the 20s are “late” and when I really need to start thinking about how and when I’m going to bed. Obviously it’s possible this is just my monkey brain being weird in a specific way and that nobody else would have this, so pay attention to the other reasons instead.
- (Not beneficial to an individual using it on their own as an adult, but I wanted to bring it up.) It’s arguably slightly easier for kids to learn. Kids aren’t up at midnight, and so they don’t really have to care about the clock rolling over while they’re fast asleep (if they do, they get the much more intuitive ‘0’ than ‘12’). On the other hand, the clock rolling over at noon means you as a kid really do need to understand how that works.
It’s just objectively better in most meaningful ways, and like the metric system:
- Its benefits are most evident if you grew up with it and everyone around you uses it.
- Its benefits would still be evident if everyone switched to it but hadn’t grown up with it.
- Even if you didn’t grow up with it and no one else around you uses it, it can still benefit you to use it.
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I think it’s a US thing.
I use 12h clock when context provides the am/ap variation, 24h otherwise. I have had americans tell me I sound militaristic when I tell them my flight lands at "seventeen fifteen ". I guess they are right, the NATO format for time uses 24h clock.
Haha
Remember me when you learn this about the metric system
As is so often the case, wikipedia has a helpful map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#/media/File:12_24_Hours_World_Map.svg
For all of exclusively 12 hour, exclusively 24 hour, 24 hour in writing but 12 hour in speech, and just using both at random, there are entire regions of the world using that system
I switched to 24 hour time because I work over night and have an inconsistant sleep schedule. It makes it easier to determine how much sleep I got and the exact time of day when waking up.
It’s interesting how different people process time. For some, pure numbers make sense, and adjusting to 24-hour time is a trivial matter. But for others such as myself, who came to understand time on analog clocks, we understand time visually, especially by the angles on a clock face.
It’s intuitive to me to “do math” on time by imagining what the angles of the hands would look like in two (or more) instances. If I need to get up by X time, I can glance at a clock and immediately know I need to go to bed by Y in order to get 8 hours of sleep, just by comparing where the clock hands would be in the morning. I rarely have to actually calculate anything, and even when converting between time zones, having an analog clock base means just counting the difference around the circle. Using a digital clock, by contrast, means having to visually interpret those numbers as they would be represented by clock hands. Those clock hand angles represent “the time” to me in a way that numbers on a digital display cannot. I understand 24 hour time, I’ve even used it professionally. But considering that it requires multiple conversions to arrive at the format (visual angles) that my brain uses to understand time, it’s far too much work for me, personally, to use in daily life.
I’m not advocating for or against any particular system, and I hope that others can benefit from the switch you suggest. I just think it’s important to note that some of us have a visual concept of time, and/or don’t easily abstract time onto pure numbers, and that difference can make switching from an analog 12-hour system to a digital 24-hour system more difficult.
Is there a lemmy community devoted to the superiority of 24-hour time yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI : reminded me of this, my Dad used to love this!
Thanks for sharing; that was great!
The person who made the clock copied it from a sundial. You can’t say it’s not logical because that’s how physics works.
So ancient Mesopotamians used to count on their hands slightly different. They wouldn’t count their thumbs, instead they would count each knuckle with their thumb so, 3 knuckles per finger and 4 fingers each hand
You can do this too - you have the same hands :)
cries in Habsburg
Don’t worry, you can count to higher numbers in sets of 15, with your heroic lordly number of fingers, rather than sets of 12, like I have with my ghastly peasant fingers.
86,400 is not a perfect cube (or any other power) so unless you change the number of seconds in a day you’re not getting a way to perfectly represent 3 different sized time measurements in the same circle without something like 6=30m/30s
We could just change time… again… to make seconds slightly longer and have there be 85,184 seconds in a day. And then 44 seconds in a minute and 44 minutes in an hour and 44 hours in a day…. But 44 is a lot of numbers to put around a clock just because you’re too lazy to multiply by 2 or 5, shit 2nd graders can do so…. Nah.
fun fact during the si process there was also a proposal to make a minute 100 seconds and an hour 100 minute and a day 10 hours (and adjust the second length so that it still syncs up with the sun ofc) but it never got implemented, probably because auf big clock-manufecturing puts on alu hat
12/24 hours come from the idea that there are 12 day hours and 12 night hours. Historically most clock systems counted hours since sunrise. Counting since midnight is a recent change.
Where the 12 comes from? No idea. That’s a decision that was made several thousands years ago. It could be from some smart counting of fingers, joints, etc. It could come from the fact that 12 has a lot of dividers. It could be religious reasons (zodiac has 12 animals). Honestly no idea.
12 has more divisibles than 10.
12, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1
10, 5, 2, 1
Some suspect 12 was picked because you can more easily divide up into more useful time chunks.
Edit: you wrote this in your comment and I missed it somehow.
Historically double length hours also existed: 6 hours for daytime and 6 hours for nighttime.
One can’t rule out the convenient dividers argument but I think that can’t be the only reason.
Then why don’t we use a base 12 counting system instead?
I think some cultures used it. We use the base 10 mainly because of our 10 fingers but if you start counting with 0 (counting the closed fist) you could easily count to 12 with your hands as well.
US length measurements…
The US didn’t exist when these choices were made
Base 12 or base 8 would make me so happy.
But if could be worse. Imagine a universe where some idiot established base 7 or base 13.
Base prime sounds kinda cool though
True. It does sound cool for the same reason it would be a total nightmare to use.
im convinced that base 8, or octal, as it’s known in cs was developed specifically for the purposes of computationally derived terrorism.
Just use binary, it’s better. If you really care, just use hex.
A base prime would quiet my OCD 😓
It gets triggered by divisors?
I almost would have expected the opposite. Though I get that you can’t control it in any way.
For all the sense it makes… If it can be divided into a non prime. it is bad. Bad time, bad day, bad week, bad month, bad year… If I’m anxious it’s temperature and number of steps I took to arrive at my last destination
we do, it’s literally the imperial system.
If you want a real answer, it’s probably to do with arabic numerals being a base ten system, then being adopted globally, after the standardization of a base 12 in isolation for something like time. Arabic numerals specifically probably resulting from us often having 10 fingers, so it’s a natively intuitive system from that aspect. Though representing numbers from other systems (like base 12) in systems like base 10, isn’t hard, so most often, we just don’t really think of them existing in base 12 (like time does) since we think in base 10 most of the time.
Ask someone who has dealt with the binary system about this, and they will tell you the exact same thing. Even people experienced with binary counting logic still natively translate it to base 10 because it’s more intuitive that way. It’s one of the reasons that the doubling of possibilities every additional bit is a relevant discussion. Technically in the frame of binary, you’re just adding one more place value, however due to how binary works, and how base 10 works, it’s a rather disconnected counting system (base 10 has a lot more redundant uses of numbers, binary is mathematically perfect)
It’s the same reason why different parts of the world speak different languages with different grammar rules, shit’s weird, and sometimes it doesnt get adopted logically.
We used to. It’s called a dozen
Huh, that actually makes some sense. How would it be written, I guess spoken you could easily go “eleven dozen and seven”, presumably you would need another symbol for 10/11. Write it as B7 if you wanted to use A/B similar to how you would use A-F with hexadecimal.
Probably take some time to get used to it from being used to using decimal.
The “eleven dozen and seven” is functionally no different from “One hundred and thirty-nine.” We’d just have 2 more characters than we do now.
We even have a name for a third digit in base-12. 12 dozen is a “gross”.
The Babylonians used base 60, which is neat because it cleanly divides by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, whereas base 10 has just 2 and 5.
Yeah but who’s got the taller tower?? Checkmate Babylonians
probably the way we used to do it before we got arabic numerals, with knuckle counts and long hundreds
it depends on whether or not “eleven” would be base ten 11, or base 12 eleven.
That’s not really base 12, it’s just a special name for the decimal number 12.
It is now, but it used to be part of a base 12 system. 12 is a dozen, a dozen dozen is a gross, and dozen gross is a great gross.
There was some rough times as it switched to decimal and you wind up with bullshit like the ‘long hundred’ being 10 dozen and a short hundred being 10 tens.
Fair enough.
I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren’t writing things down so much in the 1500’s and maybe there were characters for those numbers.
I wonder if that’s why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.
Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn’t have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means ‘two left’ after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means ‘ten more than three’).
It really is like that. Some people used to count with their fingers differently than we do now. They counted with the thumb on one hand, with each finger beginning (i.e. where the finger is connected to the hand) and each knuckle having a value. In total, with four fingers you get 4x3=12, which is where the expression ‘a dozen’ comes from. The other hand was used to count how many times you did this; strangely enough, with the fingers as we know them. So you could count up to 60.
At least that’s how I learnt it at some point. If anyone has more information on this, please let us know!
Incidentally, I find the binary counting method with the fingers more interesting, where you can count up to 1023 with ten fingers.
Dozens, but not tens of something. I like English.
you can say tens of something, i don’t see an issue with that grammatically speaking.
“tens of thousands” literally derives from that phrasing even. similar to other weird anomalies like “ten hundred” which likely comes from “ten hundreds” for example
Technically speaking, any sort of arbitrarily defined grouping used in any numeral system can be used like this. For example 2^n would be relevant when discussing binary counting. You might refer to binary number groups as powers as a result.
There are watches that are called “slow watch” which has a single hand and a dial that goes from 0 to 24. They kinda make more sense than regular watches.
I have one, and that they do, except for the people trying to sneak a glance of the time haha. “Huh?”
I rather love mine, to me there’s little reason to prefer a 12 hour clock when you have minute and second hands on the 24 also (my version does, it’s not a “slow watch”)
Don’t make me start telling you the time in bells
